Televisions are popular with consumers. Because of advances in recent technology, electronic on-screen program guides have enabled viewers to quickly find and watch desired programs without bulky paper-bound guides. These electronic program guides (EPGs) allow viewers to see what TV programs are playing, or scheduled, on all the channels available to the viewer. Each day, hundreds of thousands subscriber set top boxes may request new electronic program guides (EPGs) during early morning hours. In the event of system failure (e.g., server failure), subscriber set top boxes may not be able to communicate with the servers responsible for providing these new electronic program guides (EPGs). Set top boxes whose initial update requests have failed may continuously send update requests every few seconds. However, in the event of a long failure period, these clustered update requests may further overwhelm the system/servers, leading to new request failures and new reattempts.